the aesthetics of digital poetry.

"A lot is happening in poetry these days!

While publishing houses complain about how difficult it is to sell even limited print runs of poetry collections, increasing popularity is enjoyed by CD and DVD productions, poetry films, and especially live poetry readings, which not infrequently reach more people than the number of buyers for a volume of verse.

Before our eyes, poetry is undergoing a process of diversification that is changing not only the forms in which it is produced, but also its media interfaces and integration. Contemporary manifestations of lyric activity include deliberately crossing or shattering boundaries of format to create poetic forms that function as primary and determining media in cooperation with other types of art. At the same time, other genres of artistic endeavor are approaching the poem, because this language-based art form with its constituent elements of script, voice, sound, and rhythmic structure already embodies a number of different media and thus appears “well equipped” for the multimedia present and future.

Avant-garde poetry movements of the last century were consistently marked by breaking away from the book format. This means the line of verse, as a notation of characters, as acquired the dimension of an image (visual poetry), and that the structural elements inherent in poetry (rhythm, sound) have been released beyond the bounds of the book to be depicted as constitutive of the poem as such (sound poetry)...Serious attempts to summarize developments in poetry over recent years cannot avoid depicting it as an independent art form, an art that features a diverse spectrum of media representations and that exists in a wide array of forms, of which the book is just one.

This diversity includes producing texts on a digital basis and working with the corresponding linguistic material, i.e., creating aesthetic solutions as translations from programming languages, and generating multiplicity and metamorphosis from "one" and "zero." As far back as Plato, deliberations on the essence of poetry have described this as a means of transferring being from non-being. The consequences are far-reaching for the existence of poetry and its presentation, in terms of both media employed and the aesthetic product.

Digital poetry can thus build on the achievements of visual, sound, and concrete poetry, which underwent tempestuous expansion the world over during the twentieth century as expressions and working forms of modern verse.”

-- Dr. Thomas Wohlfahrt, Director of the literaturWERKstatt berlin